by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Like Tool and Type O Negative before them, My Dying Bride fuses heavy metal with the deep, foreboding sense of gloom that informed mid-'80s goth-rock. As the Flower Withers, My Dying Bride's debut album, is a self-consciously tortured set of slow, unbearably heavy and morbid heavy metal. It's an album that's not about songs -- it's about sounds and textures and for fans of self-obsessed, apocolyptic metal, As the Flower Withers ain't that bad.